


not puzzle pieces, but dominoes

by thewintersolstice



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Dialogue Heavy, Emotional Hurt, Established Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard, Kandriel, M/M, Past Kevin Day/Andrew Minyard - Freeform, Polyamory Negotiations, Post-Canon, Pre-Poly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-10 11:42:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27970031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewintersolstice/pseuds/thewintersolstice
Summary: A breakup, a question, an agreement. Three conversations that have to happen before anything can fall into place between Andrew, Kevin and Neil.“Andrew,” Kevin growls out and Andrew has boxed him in, against the wall, but not laid a hand on him and Kevin’s eyes haven’t left his face, unmoved.“You -- we -- have the potential for something powerful and real and you refuse to admit it to me."
Relationships: Kevin Day/Andrew Minyard, Kevin Day/Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard, Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard, minor Kevin Day/Neil Josten - Relationship
Comments: 3
Kudos: 56





	not puzzle pieces, but dominoes

“You want a reason to be here? I am here. You see it, you see me, and yet you refuse to admit that this - that I - am something you might want. I do not understand,” Kevin bites it out, his voice is clipped. Andrew can see the tension held hostage in his body, holding in an emotion that has felt out of place for an itch too long. Andrew indulges him in the push forward, but he feels unsteady too, like he’s standing on the bow of a ship that threatens to tip. He hunkers down, pushes back.

“You are not in a fit state -- now or anytime soon -- to presume that you are the rock to hold me to. Our mutual destruction is not something I desire.”

“You think I will destroy you? You think I --”

“Can’t hold up a racket, much less yourself?” And suddenly Kevin is on the defensive, just like Andrew knew he would be, just with the ease of his voice, of how to push Kevin’s buttons. Liquor brings him closer to it, to that fight that Andrew always feels on the edge of his vision. 

“That has nothing to do with what I am saying to you now,” Kevin grinds out, pushes forth, and everything feels like a struggle still, and Andrew wants him to feel. He wants to wreck him. Wants him to turn in disgust and forget this conversation because it will do them no good. He knows Kevin well enough to know he won’t. Sees the sharpness in his eyes, the way the alcohol has pushed him closer to this, this shouting match that Andrew couldn’t say he didn’t see coming. 

“You never want to give me anything. And you’ll hold back yourself to do it, and any chance of trying. I am saying this to you -- I am speaking honestly with you and you won’t even afford me the honor. The chance to meet me halfway. You have to fucking oppose me at every end. Fine, do it. Hold us back again.” 

“You want me to hold back, Kevin.” Andrew shoves into his space, and they’ve gotten closer now, each time Andrew thinks too close, that he will do something, that for a moment he’s not sure which because his feet still feel unsteady and his lips remember when Kevin’s weren’t downturned with the ugly anger he has now. But Kevin isn’t in the right place to do this, and Andrew isn’t going to become that for him, his rock and everything in between. He’s made a mistake. It does not matter how he feels about it. He pushes. “You also want things that you cannot have. That I cannot give you.” It feels like the opposite of soothing oil down his throat, like rocks, ground out when he’s trying to be smooth, to spare them this but Kevin, always the martyr, never spares himself anything. 

“Andrew,” Kevin growls out and Andrew has boxed him in, against the wall, but not laid a hand on him and Kevin’s eyes haven’t left his face, unmoved. 

“You -- we -- have the potential for something powerful and real and you refuse to admit it to me. And I know you do because you won’t deny it either, I --”

Andrew shoves the wall, hard, and breaks eye contact, turns, and forces himself to walk the other way. 

“I’m done with this, Kevin,” he says, not looking at him again, and he hears Kevin’s exhale, the shaky way he slides against the wall, just slightly.

He stares after Andrew and scowls, throws his eyes up, cannot understand a single inch of the man that anchors him here. It is a relationship that hinges every interaction he has, and he can feel the intensity of it in every stretch of his muscles, of his hand and the exhale of his breath. But he can’t be without Andrew completely. He knows it, knows it even with a haze in his heavy head and the way he still hasn’t moved from the wall, hasn’t moved an inch, weighing everything that holds him to this place. 

This is not something he can lose.

Kevin retreats back, like Andrew knows he will. Until Neil arrives. 

* * *

“You and Andrew,” Neil says one day, while he and Kevin are both sitting alone in the meeting room of the stadium, playing an old clip from a team they’d yet to face this season. The video had just ended and Neil turns his whole body to him, open and inviting the words that hover in front of them. 

He says it like it’s so simple. Kevin turns his head and can see it in Neil’s eyes that he knows it’s not. He knows Andrew as Kevin does. Did. 

“Yes. Andrew and I,” and he is astounded by the evenness in his voice. But it’s Neil. Kevin can’t put any of it on him. “I presume he told you his version of our.. relationship.” But Neil is shaking his head. 

“Only that you were together. For awhile,” and Kevin can feel the hesitance in Neil’s voice, the questions he hasn’t asked yet. For someone who lived and breathed secrets for most of his life, Neil is transparent before him and Kevin wonders when he started being able to read the scrunch of his eyebrows and the way his eyes shift when he’s nervous, like he’s searching Kevin’s face for something. Kevin doesn’t want to give it to him. 

“Then what is it you desire of me?” Kevin asks. He wants to make Neil say the things he’s come to say. He won’t hand them to him. He hesitates, again, and Kevin can see it building in his mind, the words. Imagines them like a flood, an overflowing queue to Neil’s dangerous mouth. 

“You never brought it up to me. You haven’t said anything about Andrew and I. You still teach me,” he says, slowly, like the queue is trying to reign itself in, like this is important. It still feels overwhelming to Kevin’s ears, though. 

“That’s because it is over. It’s not something that will come of anything any longer, it is of the past.” He narrows his eyes at him, anxious suddenly. “Why do you ask? Will this become a problem for you? For us, on the court?” And like a drop, like the final buzzer, Kevin’s afraid he’s misconstrued the beginning of this conversation, misstepped too far off. 

“No, no, of course not. It changes nothing like that for me. I just. I was surprised.”

“What? That it did not end in bloodshed and chaos, as one would expect from Andrew?” he redirects, but even then Kevin feels his slipup. Neil and he. They don’t have to talk about Andrew as if he is a self destructing walking bomb. The way the others view him. Neil knows that is not his way. They both know how carefully Andrew can hold the things he cares for. 

“No. That it didn’t last,” Neil says simply, quietly. And Kevin stares at him. Neil shifts under it, uncomfortable, and then, defending himself just as quickly. “You two were inseparable when I came to the team. You are still. I can imagine - or, I can see - how it made sense. That you had each other, that you are one of the only ones who knows what he’s like. It makes sense. It makes less sense why you ended it, to me.” 

And Kevin feels like he’s been hit, right there, by both of them simultaneously. 

“That is a bold statement to make, seeing as you know Andrew as well as I do. You know how stubborn he is,” and Kevin struggles to keep his voice cold, sturdy. He will not spill his soul to Andrew’s new lover, even if it is Neil, who he would give almost anything in the world to. Who deserves it just the same. But his truths stick in his throat because if Andrew wanted it, it would be true.  _ He didn’t choose me _ . The unspoken statement sits between them in the air, and Kevin almost backs down.

And now Neil is staring at him, wordless. And Kevin is staring back and this feels like a show, a show where Andrew will pop out, surely, and say something as they both sit here and confetti will fly and streamers and someone will blow a kazoo-- 

“He truly did not tell you much.” Kevin says finally, because it must be true and because he cannot stand to see Neil speechless before him, to be having this conversation, this non-conversation here when they had been having a fine time watching Exy. “And I still do not understand why we’re having this conversation. Like I have told you, it is in the past. It was buried, and I think it’s slightly off to be having a conversation asking me why I am not currently still with  _ your _ boyfriend.”

And Neil doesn’t balk at the word, but it’s a close thing, and they both know it. Both know that the word doesn’t mean anything to Neil’s actual relationship with Andrew, that they are more than that. But it’s strange to hear, everytime. For them both. Different reasons. 

“Did you fight for it? For him?” Neil says, and he is still quiet, his voice still tilting with the uncertainty. He doesn’t know where this leads either, it seems. Kevin gets mad. 

“Of fucking course I did,” and its out of his throat before he can control it, and it feels raw, sliding out unbidden. For Neil to see. For Neil to analyze. He and Andrew are both so good at it. It makes Kevin feel out of step, sometimes, where they both have reached the ledge of understanding and he is still one step behind, always. Always.

Neil stiffens, but his eyes aren’t unkind, aren’t harsh. They have that understanding and for a moment Kevin feels sick with it. Sick of them toting it in front of him. 

At the same time, he wants to drown himself in the way that Neil looks at him. 

* * *

“He’s in love with you,” Neil says casually, after he throws his jacket over the back of their couch, walks into their empty apartment, almost knocks into Andrew’s knees, pulled up against his chest while he reads. He looks up, no change in emotion. Not that Neil was expecting one. He doesn’t repeat himself, looks at Andrew. Has all the time in the world. Feels adrenaline coming off of him, fresh from almost bolting his way back after he and Kevin’s conversation. 

“He thinks he is,” Andrew replies, waves it off like a fly he’d already dealt with, should be belly up on the linoleum of the kitchen. 

“He cares about you, Andrew. It still upset him, when I brought it up,” Neil repeats, doesn’t stray from his station, his stance, everything pointed at Andrew until he can beg attention out of him with only his voice. “I was surprised. When he told me that he wasn’t the one to end it.”

Andrew’s eyes move to Neil’s then. Focused, unmoved. 

“You care about him. You’ve never stopped caring about him,” Neil says. 

“I am with you.” Andrew replies, as if it is a reminder of their predicament. Their decision. Them. 

“You don’t deny it though,” and now Neil is grinning, as if he’s already won, as if he’s cracked something in the air here. They are close, so close to something he sees sparkle in the spaces between them.

“You make such little sense sometimes I can’t dare to talk with you,” Andrew quips back, and moves his eyes back to reading. Knows that Neil hasn’t finished with the bone he’s dug up before them. 

“Andrew.” Neil presses, voice serious, and Andrew still won’t look up from his book, but his eyes don’t move across the page and his lips move,

“He was a mess, when he first got here.” Neil makes a committal noise, agreement. He believes him. “I allowed it to happen, but I knew that I couldn’t be Riko for him.” Andrew says it blandly, and his eyes meet up with Neil’s again and he feels the tug of it, the weight that name carries around them and Neil sobers in a second, the giddiness draining from him. 

“But he’s not like that, anymore. Riko’s gone,” Neil says, reminds them both, but he knows that Andrew’s right, that it’s Kevin that still nearly flinches at his name. “And I don’t think that’s how it was anyway. You’re you, and Kevin knows that. He knows you’re not like him, Andrew,” Neil says, and he feels the weight of it too, hands back the seriousness in equal measure, and he watches Andrew’s expression remain. He can see his fingers are hard around the book he’s holding, forgotten now, and Neil savours Andrew’s name on his mouth instead. Feels himself propelled forward, and he’s leaning into his space, across the arm of the chair, his thighs pressed against it. 

“He’s in love with you,” Neil presses, incessant like a moth to a light, sure that it’ll house and warm and hold him, that it is  _ right _ . He looks down at Andrew, begging him to see it too, but he doesn’t move and Neil backs off slightly, feels the jubilation swarming him, the buzzing energy in the swing of his arms. 

“So you want me to do what exactly about it?” Andrew’s voice is flat, and his eyes won’t leave Neil’s grinning mouth, like he’s upset that Neil’s in on the joke and he isn’t. “Where does your stupid face come in,” Andrew says, deadpan, and as easily as that it switches, and Neil’s back to grinning, to bearing down on him and his face hovers closer to Andrew, leaning into him. 

“Does it change things, to know that I care about Kevin too?” And this catches his attention, his eyes on Neil’s, and his hands have gone to Neil’s wrists, fastened them now that he’s leaned further in. Andrew opens his mouth, leans in to kiss Neil, who has been waiting and waiting, who surges forward too and kisses him hard, strong, right right  _ right _ . 

And its the thought of Kevin that fills all the gaps between their skin.

**Author's Note:**

> As is with the other fics I've published here, the first part of this was sitting in my drafts for weeks! I wrote it after looking at Nora's extra content and thinking about the reasons that Kevin/Andrew couldn't come to be before Neil. And because there is a 'before Neil' so must there be an 'after Neil'. Once I started the second scene I knew it had to be three.
> 
> I'm so excited to post this because AFTG is one of my favorite book series, and one that I read when I want to find comfort in characters whose motivations and interactions always make sense to me. Still salty that Kandriel didn't end up end game, though, so here's my contribution! 
> 
> I also realized, after finishing the third scene, that obviously there still needed to be a conversation between all three of them. But the balance felt right to end here, so I might write the resolution as a part ii eventually :) Enjoy enjoy & have a fantastic day!!


End file.
